James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an influential American novelist, poet, playwright and civil rights activist.

Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City. As a teenager, he would preach in a revivalist church after school – an experience that later inspired his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and the essays in Notes of a Native Son. Dissatisfied by the racial prejudice he experienced and coming to terms with his own homosexuality, Baldwin left America in 1948 for Paris, where he wrote his second novel, Giovanni’s Room - a ground-breaking portrayal of gay love.

Returning to the United States in 1957, Baldwin joined the civil rights movement and became one of the key public voices of Black experience through works such as Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, and in the 1962 novel Another Country. He later also became a figurehead for America’s gay rights movement.